Streaming media is a technology that has steadily grown over the course of the Internet's popularity. A media stream is generally a cohesive segment of some media, such as video, audio, data, or the like. In a typical application a user may access a streaming media source to listen to music, view a movie or video feed, whether live or pre-recorded, all played from a remote server. The server generally sends the media segments across the Internet to the user, who generally must have a compatible media player to view the steaming media. Many different users may access the media stream, referred to as subscribing, to view or play the same content. Players such as the MICROSOFT WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER™, REALNETWORK'S REALONE PLAYER™ and REALPLAYER™, QUICKTIME™ PLAYER, and the like, render the different media streams depending on their formats and display or play the media to the user.
Playlists are generally a list of media segments that are played in the playlist order. For example, radio stations typically plan the songs they will play throughout any given day by assembling a list of artists and songs for the disc jockeys to either play or monitor. In digital media, a sequence of media segments, for example, music, can be played one after the other either on a user's local machine, or played on the server side. Most media players, such as the MICROSOFT WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER™, allow a user to assemble a list of digitally recorded songs or video clips on the user's computer to play in any sequence selected by the user.
Streaming media is generally played from the server side, allowing individual users to subscribe to the media streams. Server-side programmers and administrators may basically combine snippets from different media files and treat them as one media output or stream. A television broadcasts is a similar concept where the content and advertisements are interspersed with each other with the user watching them on a single channel. While the media is being switched from one to another, the user does not intervene in anyway and experiences only a “single” stream of the channel broadcast. One of the limitations with this server-side playlist scheme is that the user must usually not only know what it is that the user wants to view (i.e., the media format and access address), but the media must also typically have an explicit resource as well (e.g., channel 1, 6, and the like).
While playlists may provide the user with multimedia content that is very rich and very entertaining or informational, it is still a rather static experience among the growing number of dynamic and interactive applications appearing on the Internet. The user can subscribe or unsubscribe and, when subscribed, see or hear only the content playing on the server. While this may be acceptable in the case of a movie or song, if the streaming media is an instructional program, the user can only sit and experience the media. Users may overcome this limitation by developing their own playlists locally. However, those playlists cannot generally be shared with other users across a network without copying the entire playlist content to the other users.